1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a supplier portal to assist in global procurement in an electronic business (e-business) environment and, more particularly, to a single point of contact for all electronic procurement (e-procurement) applications using a database to entitle users to access restricted applications available from the portal. The portal provides establishing a very flexible registration process customizable for each application; e.g., defining 1 to n level approval cycles, defining application specific registration fields, authorizing new tasks to a role, etc.
2. Background Description
In the past, global procurement users had to keep track of a different user identification (userid), password and universal resource locator (URL) for each of the global procurement applications they used. The process of managing business, technical and operational data became burdensome because of the many redundancies and different user interfaces required in accessing procurement applications.